Universities Should Be More Cautious on Chinese Ventures, British Paper Says.
The Chronicle of Higher Education,
Paul Mooney, 17 December 2007
Is doing business in China dangerous - or at least harder than it may appear? A British higher-education think tank raised that question, and provided some controversial answers, in a recent discussion paper.
University leaders arrive in Beijing and Shanghai every week seeking to set up cooperative arrangements, "yet there is no overarching strategy about what U.K. higher education should be trying to achieve in China in the long term - or what form these partnerships should take," states the report, "British Universities in China: The Reality Beyond the Rhetoric." It was published this month by Agora, a British organization.
The paper, which includes commentaries from academics with international experience and presents several case studies, also expresses some strongly worded views about China's motives in seeking cooperation with foreign universities. It asserts that China intends to make gains in science and technology by absorbing British talent and intellectual property. The warnings, including one issued by the former provost of a British campus in China, could apply to American universities as well.
In the paper's introduction, Anna Fazackerley, Agora's director and a former journalist, writes that "it would be foolish not to see the emerging power of China as an opportunity - but it is also a serious threat that must be stared squarely in the face." That threat, she explains, centers around China's massive expansion of its higher-education system, which has grown rapidly both in terms of student enrollment and the amount of money the government is pouring into universities.
Ian Gow, an expert on Asia and former provost of the University of Nottingham at Ningbo, China, expresses similar skepticism toward dealing with that nation. British universities "must stop pussyfooting around this aggressively ambitious country," he writes.
"Make no mistake: China wants to be the leading power in higher education, and it will extract what it can from the U.K.," writes Mr. Gow, who now heads the business school at the University of the West of England.
British and American academics who have done business in China expressed skepticism over such warnings, with one calling the report "parochial, insular, and arrogant."
Sir Colin Campbell, vice chancellor of the University of Nottingham, which in 2004 became the first foreign university granted a license to build an outpost in China, said that universities are ideally suited and even obliged, in an era of growing globalization, to expand overseas.
"We are building an international university, with international faculty and students, a Western commitment to research and a Western commitment to pedagogy, and we are making a contribution to the opening up of that country," he said.
In an interview, Mr. Gow said he felt "bruised and puzzled" by the negative reaction to his comments. "I'm not saying don't go to China," he emphasized. "What I'm saying is go with your eyes wide open."
University administrators were more willing to concede another point made by several of the authors: that setting up partnerships in China can be challenging.
"China is a difficult terrain to traverse if you don't go out and do your homework," said Denis F. Simon, provost and vice president for academic affairs of the Neil D. Levin Graduate Institute of International Relations and Commerce of the State University of New York, which is working with Chinese and Canadian counterparts to develop a new campus near Nanjing to open within the next 18 months. "It's not surprising to see people hit a wall or walk away disillusioned," he said.
In his report, Mr. Gow said the challenges of establishing programs in China are many, including finding high-quality staff members, the lack of "enabling regulatory frameworks" for joint ventures with foreign institutions, and partners that are constantly changing their terms.
"Vice chancellors must be very careful not to get sucked in too quickly to agreements," he writes. "Often when confronted with the next stage, they will find the agreement has apparently changed - partners are very adept at changing direction because 'Beijing said no.'"
"The institutions currently negotiating entry will gain it on Chinese terms," he adds, "with the Chinese very much in control."
Officials at several universities with programs in China said they were careful to do due diligence before getting involved and that caution contributed to their successes.
The University of Leeds, for example, opted against opening a campus in China and has instead pursued partnerships there and elsewhere through the Worldwide Universities Network. Through such links, said Michael Arthur, Leeds's vice chancellor, "you build relationships and mutual trust, and then I think you can overcome many of the problems that are suggested in the report. That's what we've done, and I think it's been reasonably successful."
Anna Fazackerley, Agora's director, noted in the report that the Chinese government is more choosy these days about which foreign universities it will allow into the country. In an interview, she said she learned that China has recently pulled out of 67 partnership agreements in the Shanghai region.
"I think many were with universities that were non-elite, which is a very interesting marker in that it suggests the way things are going," she said. The apparent move by China to focus on collaborations with the most-prestigious overseas universities will prove especially disappointing to those institutions that have been emphasizing such partnerships as a means of improving their international-ranking scores, she noted.
Mr. Gow said in the interview that he wanted to issue "a robust wake-up call" that the situation in China had changed, with the Chinese government now being more selective about which foreign universities local institutions partner with, and with the focus now clearly on science and technology.
Some academics doing business in China say that the Chinese government's more restrictive attitude is not wholly unexpected. Chinese officials had previously had a "laissez-faire" approach toward foreign universities, said Robert Ubell, executive director of Stevens Institute for the Advancement of Online Learning and Professional Education, which has been waiting for approval of two degree programs at Shanghai Jiaotong University.
"The Ministry of Education is in a difficult position because it had opened its arms to international partnerships but didn't have effective barriers," said Mr. Ubell, who directs Stevens's Chinese ventures. "They're retreating because they have to come to terms with who they should or shouldn't permit to operate in the country."